Will Piracy Kill Football in Italy? Not if Football Damages the Internet First

Proponents of Italy's site blocking juggernaut to protect the country's top tier football league have shown their true colors. Proposed amendments to the 'Piracy Shield' law state that, if any network service provider even suspects criminal activity, they must immediately report to the authorities. This includes search engines, DNS and VPN providers, reverse proxy servers, internet security platforms. Failure to report or even a delay in reporting would be punishable by up to a year in prison.

scissor-ball-sDespite warnings from internet experts, the government passed a law in 2023 aimed at combating illegal IPTV services. However, the legislation has failed to achieve its intended outcomes.

What followed wasn’t a meeting of minds with all stakeholders involved, but a steely determination to make the system work for the rightsholders. For a framework that had measures in place to punish internet companies for failing to block, but nothing in place to punish rightsholders for blocking innocent internet resources, that didn’t come as a surprise.

Disregard for Internet Services, Stealth Legal Amendments
Before Piracy Shield got off the ground, promises were made about oversight, to ensure those requesting blockades kept to the agreed limits. Among other things, that was to ensure ISPs weren’t burdened with additional costs; that is, even more costs on top of the costs they were already expected to cover from their own pockets, for nothing in return.

There was also the supervision aspect, with telecoms regulator AGCOM quite rightly expected to exercise control over blocking demands. Yet just weeks after the anti-piracy measures passed into law, another set of “urgent measures” (known as the Caivano decree) to “combat youth hardship, educational poverty, and juvenile crime” had something else hidden in the depths of its pages.

As previously reported by DDaY, amendments to the anti-piracy law, signed by the Forza Italia party, resulted in rights holders being given the right to block an IP address or poison ISPs’ DNS servers without AGCOM’s control. Some viewed that as a breach of trust, it’s not too difficult to see why.

Closing the ‘Loopholes’
It’s hardly a secret that DNS-based blocking can only achieve so much, and that those determined to circumvent blocking can do so easily by using tools such as VPNs. Everyone involved in the legislation passed in 2023 understood that. They also knew that blocking Content Delivery Networks and reverse proxy services would become a problem as soon as Piracy Shield launched early this year.

Yet, unlike most other countries that have adopted site-blocking programs, factoring-in the interests of other internet users appears to be viewed as unnecessary among Italy’s more enthusiastic site-blocking proponents. To that end, Forza Italia are back again with fresh amendments that amount to a direct attack – not on pirates – but the entire internet sector.

According to a La Gazzetta dello Sport report, this week the green light was given to the readmission of an amendment to the ‘Omnibus Decree’ in connection with VPNs and pirate IPTV.

“The proposal [by Dario Damiani of Forza Italia] wants to extend to VPNs the obligation to disable access to illegal games by blocking the use of VPNs to generate different IP addresses capable of circumventing the law,” the report notes.

Targeting VPNs? Just the Beginning
That an attempt is underway to level the playing field a little, by taking some VPNs out of the equation, doesn’t come as a surprise. However, while the report is entirely accurate, it significantly understates the scope of the proposed amendments.

The first proposal would pull VPNs AND third party DNS providers into the Piracy Shield system, requiring them to implement blocking in the same way local ISPs already do in Italy. But while only local ISPs are required to poison their DNS servers to redirect local internet users, the proposal for VPNs and DNS says they should be forced to participate in Piracy Shield wherever they are.

Proposed amendment 1 (translated from Italian)
piracy shield amendment-1
Item 1, which initially looks harmless enough, seeks to replace the word univocally with the word predominantly. Now the all-important context.

If a target blocking location (IP address/domain) isn’t shared with any legal services, blocking simply goes ahead. In the event that the targeted content shares resources (IP address/domain) with legal content, blocking can not go ahead because of the collateral damage to any legal content.

The amendment seeks to lower the threshold so that it’s legal to block legal content, if the server or resource carries predominantly illegal content. This change could increase instances of blocking significantly, which is where item 6 comes in useful.

This amendment seeks to remove all limits on the volume of blocking allowed, regardless of who that negatively affects; primarily local ISPs, as mentioned earlier.

The second proposed amendment should have alarm bells ringing across the tech sector, if not the entire country.

Proposed amendment 2 (translated from Italian)
piracy shield amendment-2
Football is a very important sport and deserves some level of protection. However, resorting to threats of imprisonment against those who invest in internet projects and offer services to millions of Italians, simply because they’re easier targets than those actually supplying the streams, is cynical at best.

Will that be a net gain or net loss to Italy as a whole? Has anyone carried out a risk assessment? Or an even better question: When that doesn’t work either, what next?

The official amendment document can be found here (pdf, Italian)